Black: the height of grief, the fulfillment of the darkest emotions, of loss and despair, of gripping fatality, the lamentation of the past, and finally, of a shredded life. It is the same color that reins the trail of an upturned stance. When it lands, it blows off dusts from the thud where even memory will find its spread a very brutal intrusion. When they say black has governed your totality, your past is lurking rendering you unhealed. Scarred. Exiled on your own incarcerator, that is. They say time will heal it all. Therefore, the bells are eerily banging at each other to the marriage of Black and Time.
With a sung litany extinguishing the light, its coupling with time gives rise to a movement or change: to mobility in itself. The procession towardsHelena’s grave (it’s the dead lady My Chemical Romance was saying ‘so long, goodnight’ to), the midnight ticking of the clock to the insomniac – as long as these things occur, there is time. If they cease, time also ceases. Meaning, time is no more than the occurrence of physical events. It is a parameter of existence. When you’re a taken – for – granted – vegetable, it means you’re on an axis but with a dead revolution.
That brings us to a commonly unanswered question about the truth of moving on: how long will it take us to do it?
A year ago, during the post – war era of my darkest life, a man, whose black clothes are adorned with silver daggers visited me and said that existence is not a one-dimensional entity. It has not just the present, as the Greeks would claim, but it has the ghosts of the past and the hopeful future. The triangulate holding these time orientations are man’s spontaneous experiences. He went on, with the daggers on his body shimmering their agreement, saying the past could have already happened but its echoes are blood – likely significant in the determination of whom we are at present. The present is in itself, the how of our moving on and the relative or our justifiable living.
With his face obscured of any luminescence, he continued to speak in a low and sinister voice of calmness: the future is an idealism personified as tomorrow. It is the drag in the timeline that pulls us through. In its abyssal nature, as opposed to the present, the future is eternal. It is always there and its end is only attained when the ground builds us a cairn.
So why do we fall back and be a prisoner of the past?
He answered, ‘”history repeats itself in our memories for the purpose of building in us the real fear of something unconcluded. Denial with the forget – about – it – attitude would only become one of our most stupid mistakes yet. If it is over, why does it linger?”
“We entertain the resurrection of the past to think about where we had gone wrong. If you insist that none was ever your fault, summon your thoughts back to sensitivity and bravely walk the yard towards salvation. It’s not like you can wash away the blood splattered all over your body just by merely touching somebody else.”
“But why do people who are stuck in the past are desperately trying to break free?” I asked him that because I couldn’t believe hearing him spurt brainy ideas. Besides, I didn’t think that with those daggers swarming all over him in their shimmering assent, he had that luxury of time to tell me how to write his epitaph.
Oh, wait ‘til you read what he replied. “It is because man is not yet ready to confront those whispers that threaten the blissful promise of the future. Man idealizes the future because it is only with the Utopian mindset that his fantasies are absolutely fulfilled down to the most mediocre neediness. It is where everything is how he liked it to be – no darkness and just gladness, no pains but all gains and no funerals. This thought which transcends both the reality of the present and the past, is encompassing of the obvious irony implied by meaning. After all, man lives in a real world where the mystic occurrences are threatened by empiricism, where politics is the absence of logic and where humans eat the greenery of the past million years’ inhabitants. The escapist attitude he displays so far is not because the future has been made but because hope lingers.”
“Maybe the past went as far as seizing the entirety of your being but it’s actually up to you if you permit it to thrive that way. Point is you chart your own life to uphold the dignity of hedonism in the future. So don’t you dare forget the interplay called the present as the chance to make yourself.”
My past had also been a picket fence of a delirious yearning, a glass – breaking litany and a lost mother. That’s ten years ago, two years ago, and a year ago. I wasn’t ready to buy a broken portrait even if it’s cheap. I wasn’t ready to desire for victory because philosophy has just gone a little walk around the neighborhood. It was silence and resilience. Those had kept my insanity at bay.
Black: color me this. It’s hue I can never string out with my bare hands but try it on yourself and you’ll know whose entity is within you. You’re going to learn to appreciate the light afterwards because it’s not about being always a good man. It’s about a life taken away that’s why you have to learn to fight.
Those are the things that make the mobility of time along the trail of a three – dimensional being. Of course that man disappeared as soon as I opened my eyes. He eluded me since then, even if I had to hold daggers myself for him to come back. But his visit sure made me see that the daggers are the past I’ve had, his black clothes are my present undertakings, and his ever – obscured face is the future that I couldn’t see.
Meanwhile, this is for you, you interested reader: Do wait for time to heal you but do not also forget to chip in a few ounces of self – help for your own sake. Remember that time is over for those who dwell in the past, time is stolen for those too engrossed in the present and time is yet to be born for the person who sees tomorrow. As for me:
“Move! I’d like to step ahead if you don’t mind.”
Thank you, 建鹏 邵, for the featured image.